It’s been a bit of an odd couple of months, for me. You’ll remember, perhaps, that a few years ago I was blogging about autism, and how I think I may be autistic. I still think that, though I still don’t see what benefit a formal diagnosis would offer me. The more I look back on the first 42 years of my life, the more incidents and occasions I remember, which would seem to support this theory.

At the end of August, I had a bit of a dental crisis. Not a massive one – I’ve had toothache, in the past, that made me want to remove my own head with a machete, and it wasn’t that bad. But I was in pain, and I spent a week on antibiotics, at the end of which, I had the tooth removed, leading to another few days of discomfort, and general feeling sorry for myself.

In that time, I was looking for ways to console myself, and on two separate occasions, I spent a whole day on the sofa in my pyjamas, watching Netflix. Specifically, since I was looking for gentle, comforting TV, watching the American sit-com, How I Met Your Mother.

I think I’d watched the first four or five episodes previously, one at a time, months earlier. I wasn’t particularly into it, it was just an easy way to fill twenty-two minutes. What I found, now, though, was that I was feeling stressed, and in need of comfort and reassurance, and I developed an autistic obsession with HIMYM that was more intense that anything I’ve experienced in recent times.

I watched it constantly. There are nine seasons of How I Met Your Mother, and I covered them all in less than three weeks. My HIMYM peak was August bank holiday Monday, when I watched thirty episodes in one day – roughly ten hours, give or take. On other days, my real life intervened to prevent such levels of commitment, but mostly I resented it. All I was interested in doing was watching How I Met You Mother. I dreamed about the characters, I thought about them more than I thought of any of my real-life family and friends. I was the silent, sixth member of the gang, taking my seat at the booth in MacLaren’s bar.

The thing is, I’m not an idiot. I knew this was a level of obsession way beyond anything a normal person would indulge in. And whilst I was loving the show, and wanting to spend all my time immersed in it, I was also a little ambivalent about the experience. It’s possible to love something with all your heart, but feel completely trapped by it at the same time. And I was trapped. I wanted to be able to think about other things, to do other things, with real people, without feeling permanently distracted by the current plight of Ted or Barney.

To some extent, I chose to dive into the deepest part of the obsession, with a view to ploughing through it as quickly as possible. If I spent two weeks doing nothing else, I could get to the end of season nine, and hopefully, come up for air once it was over, and I knew how it ended. So that’s what I did – I forged ahead, until one memorable Saturday morning, when I watched the season finale, and like a punch to the gut, it was over.

I was devastated, and it’s very hard to say why.

Certainly, the season finale was an emotional one, and in fact, quite difficult to take. It did not resolve the loose ends in quite the way I was hoping, and being so emotionally involved with the characters, I sobbed bitterly over the fates of Ted and Barney. I am assured by friends who have watched it since, that it’s really not that sad. I don’t exaggerate when I tell you, I cried for most of Saturday, and couldn’t really talk about it without filling up, until about Tuesday, three days later.

I suspect that part of my strong emotional reaction was to a sense of loss. HIMYM had been my waking and sleeping companions for weeks, and once the last episode had passed, I had to accept never seeing them again – or at least, never seeing them do anything new again. I could, of course, go back to the beginning, which I did, immediately, but rewatching something is a different experience to seeing it for the first time. I would never again see a new episode. I would only be able to relive what had gone before, like flicking through a photo album after someone has died.

Do I sound too dramatic? I don’t think I’m exaggerating. That’s really how I felt.

I’m now in a position to tell you how the life-cycle of an obsession like this works out – for me, at least. I watched the whole thing in three weeks, with little space in my head for anything else. Then I started to watch it again, more slowly – perhaps only devoting a couple of hours a day, on a quiet day, and less, if I had other things to do. A little way into my first rewatch, though, I had a number of Thoughts, regarding the character of Barney, and how he developed during the nine seasons. So I opened up a document in Google Docs, and started to write down some of those thoughts.

Reader, I have written 16,000 on character development in How I Met Your Mother. It’s not wildly academic, insofar as I haven’t written an academic essay of this type since I finished my MA Dissertation in 2003, and in any case, why would anyone bother with proper referencing if no-one was ever going to mark it? But yes, phase two of obsession starts with a few paragraphs of Thoughts, and turns into a dissertation-length treatise. At least I was watching less, huh?

It’s currently early November, and I’m up to my third rewatch. This time is much slower, though. It’s much more like sliding in a warm bath at the end of the day. I watch an episode, maybe two (they are only 22 minutes long, after all), then move on to something else, quite voluntarily – not because I’m forcing myself away. And this is the third phase. I’ve absorbed all there is to absorb, I’ve expressed all that I’ve got to express, and now it slips back into a core part of my being, with all the other things I once loved passionately, and will always hold in great affection. The Chalet School books, Summer Holiday, When Harry Met Sally, The West Wing, How I Met Your Mother.

Apparently, an obsessive, immersive relationship with fiction is one of the ways in which autism in women and girls presents itself differently to autism in men and boys. The depth of my obsession might have been less, if I hadn’t spent all that time feeling sorry for myself over dentistry, and if my lifestyle didn’t give me so much freedom to drop everything and live in a fantasy for three weeks. I’m not sure I would have spent any less time on it, mind – it just would have taken longer to work itself out. In the end, I chose deep and fast over long and drawn out.

Anyway, it’s been an interesting time.

Anyone want to read a 16,000 word essay about how Barney is better than Ted?

It’s not 11% pay rise it’s 9.26% yes it’s high but lets get the number right – the pay rise happens in 2015 – and between now and then MPs are getting a 1% pay rise a year anyway – so in 2015 values they go from £67,731 to £74,000

The recommendations are cost neutral to the taxpayer (so overall they are not getting more money) – while the headline pay is going up, MPs will lose out on the payments they get when they leave parliament, what they can claim (they won’t be able to claim evening meals for example) and their pensions is being downgraded significantly to be more normal.

Once it’s implemented MPs pay will be linked to average earnings – So this shouldn’t happen again.

IPSA were asked to fix a problem and they have – they have looked at where MPs wages should sit in relation to other jobs, removed some of the rouge payments around the edge and have set out a way for this to remain fixed into the future.

You can agree or disagree with the levels and how but you should probably understand how they reached the numbers they did.

A very old friend of mine used to say, “Guilt is a wasted emotion.” I’m not sure I can make a lot of sense out of the idea of any emotion being a waste, but she wasn’t entirely wrong. Guilt is certainly exhausting. It drives you to second guess yourself, and tie yourself in knots worrying about what other people think of you, and none of that does you a scrap of good.

Because the thing is, most of our guilt doesn’t come from within. It comes from the expectations we let other people lay upon us – sometimes the expectations that we project onto their entirely innocent selves. Guilt is heavily tied up with shame – the fear that other people will find out the terrible, secret truths about who we really are.

If your guilt is genuinely driven by the knowledge that you did a bad thing, then the best thing you can do for your own peace of mind is look for forgiveness – if you’re lucky, from the person you injured in the process. But really, whether that person exists, noticed, and is prepared to forgive you, or not, forgiving yourself is where the growth is going to be. To be able to say, “I did this thing. I should have done something else, or else done nothing at all, but I can’t go back and change it now. I choose to learn from my mistake, I choose to do my best to do better in future, and since I can do no more, I’m through beating myself up over it.” – that’s where freedom lies. Arguably, the entire theological idea of God’s forgiveness is a mechanism to allow people to forgive themselves. It’s a way of saying, “Look – God forgives you! And if it’s good enough for him, why not cut yourself some slack, too?”

But for most of the stuff we feel bad about, most of the pressures we put on ourselves, it’s really not as dramatic as that. It’s just about making your own choices about priorities – whether that’s prioritising how hard you will work, how thinly you’re prepared to spread yourself, what you want to eat at a given time, it’s your life. They are your choices. Only you can make them, and if someone is trying to make them for you, they’re wrong. Don’t let them. Your very freedom depends on it.

Now, the first thing I should say is that I don’t think I have ever met a mother who didn’t feel guilty. You wake up after your first post-delivery sleep, and the crushing fear that you’re just not doing it well enough is with you from pretty much that moment onwards. So, when I’m talking about being guilt-free in this context, I’m probably only talking about being relatively guilt-free, if I’m honest. At best.

When our first child was born, and I found myself doing the stay-at-home mum thing for the first time, I made one thing very clear to Kevin: I am here to take care of the baby. If, by the time you walk in the door, the baby is alive, more or less clean and more or less fed, then I have done my job. If during the intervening period I have also washed some dishes, then you are having a good day, because that’s a bonus.

Kevin is lovely, and had no particular problem with this approach. The division of domestic labour had been more or less equal before we had Daisy, and there was no obvious reason why it should be less equal once she arrived – she did, after all, increase the workload, not reduce it.

Of course, as she grew up, and became less dependent, and I was hanging out in the house so much more than he was, most of the household jobs did end up falling to me. Not cooking (except for a brief period when I still only had one child, and she was big enough to put in front of CBeebies). And not food shopping, once I got too pregnant with number two to successfully man-handle number one into the trolley seat. But most of the rest of it has been my job for most of the time.

I am not a natural housekeeper. I am not one of these people who never sits down, and who instinctively both sees and is compelled to resolve every item out of place at all times. I’m more of a natural sit-on-the-sofa-reading-Twitter person. At one time I was a strong advocate of the Flylady system, with its heavy emphasis on the idea that I was, in fact, good enough, and it’s very logical breakdown of just what the jobs were that needed to be done. The biggest flaw I found with the Flylady system, was the way the minimum number of jobs to be done was always on the increase. At the beginning, she’d say, “Just shine your sink. That’s all. Make it beautiful, make it something you’re proud of. Don’t worry about the rest of it, it’ll still be there tomorrow.” And I shined my sink, and I felt great. Two months later, I had a weekly plan to adhere to, with a strong sense of failure if I didn’t get all the things done in the one hour that I was supposed to, I had missions to fulfil to clean obscure corners of my bathroom that no-one ever saw, I had a timer to set for fifteen minute bouts of decluttering (and I hate decluttering – it’s hard!), and I had a list of “deep cleaning” jobs that were supposed to come around monthly, but which I never got around to at all. The sense of guilt and failure regularly became overwhelming, with the result that I stopped doing anything, and then, when I couldn’t live with the result any longer, had to start the whole system again from scratch.

I made many attempts to tweak the system so that it worked better for me. It kind of worked, but never for very long. It was like dieting – the effect might be impressive in the short term, but sooner or later, I would find myself right back where I started, plus an extra five pounds or so for good measure.

When I eventually spotted the pattern, it dawned on me that part way through the Flylady process, a switch was being flipped – probably by me, rather than by Flylady, but it was still being flipped. It went from being about celebrating the fact that I achieved anything, to being focussed on getting the whole list done. And the further into the system I got, the longer the list was, and the less likely I was to get through it. And that made me feel so bad, that I didn’t even start the list any more.

My current housework regime owes a lot to Flylady – she taught me a taxonomy of housework which I’ve found very useful. In short, some things need to happen most days; some things need to happen most weeks; and some things need to happen eventually. I prefer the idea of doing a single load of laundry every day, to having a week’s worth to catch up on all at once. I know that if I go a whole day without washing any dishes, the kitchen will be unusable (our kitchen has precisely four feet of work surface, including the bit under the microwave, so it gets overwhelmed very easily). I know that Other People hoover their floors every other day, but really, it’s a category two job. It would be great if it happened every week, but it doesn’t, and that’s OK.

So instead of lists of things that I feel bad about not doing, I reworked the way I thought about it. The daily jobs remain pretty much daily, though I have them prioritised – I try not to skip laundry or dishes, because my experience has taught me that it’s worse for me if I do. The rest is all about achievement. I did my exercise – go me! I ironed some creased stuff, hurrah! I spent five minutes (not fifteen – it turns out fifteen minutes is too long, and becomes a psychological barrier to doing anything at all) tidying one corner of Daisy’s bedroom – aren’t I fabulous?!

From the weekly list I took the word “weekly” away. It’s not a list of things I must do this week, it’s a rolling list of things that need to be done. As long as I do one thing from that list, I am making progress. If I do more than one, I’m amazing. Sometimes it takes two weeks, or even more, to get back to the beginning, and by then the floor can look pretty desperate for lack of hoovering, but it doesn’t matter, because I know I’ll get to it sooner or later. It’s great that I did it today, it’s not significant that I hadn’t previously done it in three weeks. Once the room is dusted, it no longer shows that I left it so long.

Doing it this way does mean that there is never a single moment when the house is “clean”. It might be hoovered, but dusty. It might have clean sheets on the beds, but sticky, unmopped floors. To be honest, that’s probably a good thing. Busting a gut to make the place nice just makes me unfriendly with family members who then have the audacity to live their ordinary life in my nice clean house. Almost every day I do SOMETHING, and every thing I do is reason for celebration.

My good friend @mamamallon lent me a book by Rachel Held Evans, called A Year of Biblical Womanhood. I was roughly as sceptical as you currently are, having read the title. Most of it didn’t blow my mind, though the author was rather less alarming, and more ordinary, than I had feared. I gained one important thing from it: the bit of the bible in Proverbs 31, where it talks about all the amazing things a “Woman of Valour” does, and sets up a seemingly impossible standard for what a decent wife/mother is like, wasn’t designed to be a stick to beat me with. It’s not a check list. It’s a celebration – a love poem, to be recited in honour of a wife/mother, not to make her feel bad, but to make her feel good! It’s there to do exactly what my housework list does – to make a tiny celebration of something getting done. She doesn’t do those things every single day – not all of them, anyway. That she does them at all, though, is worthy of celebration, so the Jews, having a small amount of wisdom in this area, celebrate it. Jewish women, to this day, according to Held Evans, congratulate one another with the Hebrew phrase, “Eshet Chayil” – “Woman of Valour!” You washed the dishes! Woman of Valour! Everyone has clean underwear! Eshet Chayil!

Living a guilt-free life is all about celebrating what you did, not obsessing about what you didn’t do. Because every little thing is, in fact, an achievement, and it’s too easy to underestimate that truth.